Daniel Im

Pastor + Author

Missional

How to Develop a Church Planting Farm System

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spruce grove community garden
My kids and an MSC harvesting their community garden

How do you feel about these statements?

  • Being excited about becoming a church that plants churches is not the same thing as doing it.
  • Picking the low hanging fruit (the already developed seminary student) and sending them out to plant is not the same thing as having a process to develop a new believer into a church planter.
  • Setting aside a percentage of your budget for church planting is not the same thing as developing future planters.

What would it look like if God answered Matthew 9:37-38 through your church? How would you feel if God raised up harvest workers and church planters through your church?

Now I know many of you might be thinking, “Yeah, yeah, I get it. I need to start a residency program or an internship program.” But that’s not what I’m talking about here.

This post is about developing a church planting farm system that starts before any type of internship or residency program. This is ultimately about developing the type of leader that you would want to accept into an internship or residency program.

Every church planting farm system requires three things.

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–> Enter: Mid-Size Communities (MSC)

When I started the mid-size community movement at my previous church (you can watch the MSC intro movie here), I said that it was going to be a way to get more people connected into community (which it totally did – 700 more people into community in three years at three campuses). However, the underlying reason I was so passionate about MSCs was because I saw them as a farm system to raise up future church planters. This pervaded the way that I developed the MSC leadership development curriculum, training strategy, roll-out plan, and everything else that accompanied it.

In fact, when you consider what makes up a healthy farm system, there seems to be three common factors:

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Four Church Planting Tips with Lesslie Newbigin

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lesslienewbigin

 

Lesslie Newbigin (1909-1998), while being best known for his work in missiology and ecclesiology, actually has a lot of advice for church planters. In fact, each of them is an extension of his quote in the picture above, or of my paraphrase below:

The church – a healthy church – is the hermeneutic of the gospel. It’s the way that the gospel comes to life. It’s the way that people can taste and smell the gospel.

When planting a church, it’s easy to go the way of the herd and get so caught up with the details, that you forget the values or the underlying ecclesiology that you’re trying to develop in the life of your church. After all, without those details getting done, you wouldn’t be able to plant a church. But what if, for a moment, you put those details aside and re-examined the type of ecclesiology that you’re developing in light of these four church planting tips that were inspired by Lesslie Newbigin’s The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society?

After all, Jesus did not write a book, but formed a community – Lesslie Newbigin

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1. Cultivate gratitude, not entitlement.

Newbigin suggests that churches need to be communities of praise and thanksgiving and that this, perhaps, is the church’s most distinctive character. So how are you cultivating a culture of praise and thanksgiving in your church? Are you being intentional with your preaching/teaching and the rest of your ministries? If you cultivate that culture of praise and thanksgiving in your church, you’ll actually see that translate into a heart of gratitude – and with gratitude, you’ll be slaying the idol of entitlement. If that happens, you’ll see your church’s “me” culture translate into a “we” culture, where the focus will be less on personal comfort and wellbeing, and more towards the wellbeing of your city and the salvation of those who are far from God.

2. Share truth, not gossip.

The fuel that drives pop culture seems to be gossip and scandals. This isn’t just true for entertainment shows, late night shows and sitcoms, but this pervades the news as well. If this is the MO (mode of operation) of our culture, this will naturally seep into the life of your church. So instead of calling your church to reject pop culture outrightly and burn all their “secular” CDs and DVDs, what if you cultivated a sense of skepticism towards it? After all, this skepticism would enable your congregation to, in the words of Newbigin, “take part in the life of society without being bemused and deluded by its own beliefs about itself.” This sense of skepticism would allow your church to be aware of pop culture, so that they could speak truth into it by being an alternate community of truth apart from it.

3. Be for your community, not just in your community.

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My Hope for Beulah, the Local Church and Edmonton

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edmonton

Whenever I pray, “God may your kingdom come and your will be done,” I’m not just going through the motions and praying some sort of ritualistic prayer. Nor am I praying it and hoping that God would do that through someone else in some other place. Since this is a part of the prayer that Jesus taught us to pray, I have confidence that he is doing “something” when we have the audacity to pray that prayer with sincerity and faith. And I’m convinced that God chooses to do that “something” through you and I – through the church.

Let’s face it. The local church can be dysfunctional because we are the local church and we can all be dysfunctional. Regardless, I have full faith in God’s redemptive power and his desire to usher in his kingdom through the local church.

God wants to usher in his kingdom through the local church.

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When I came to Edmonton, Alberta, Canada to serve at Beulah Alliance Church in 2010, I wasn’t just coming for some job. I came because I was convinced that Beulah was all about God’s kingdom and his mission. After all, since its birth in 1921, over 60 churches have been planted out of Beulah.

And now that God is leading us into a new season of ministry, I’ve been spending a lot of time reflecting on this question,

“What gives me hope that Beulah will continue on this trajectory and be a transformational kingdom agent in Edmonton and beyond?”

Here are some of my thoughts:

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How to Create a Missional Culture at Your Church (BLESS Pocket Guide)

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How can you create a missional culture at your church?

The big challenge and task for churches that are serious about creating a missional culture and participating in the mission of God, is how to normalize mission and missional engagement in the lives of her congregants.

Do you inspire your church to action with a sermon? Do you equip your church with skills and knowledge with a seminar? Or do you employ an apprenticeship model? How is it that you can best call your church to significant city-impacting, gospel-driven and spirit-empowered missional engagement?

The answer?

You need to normalize it.

You need to make missional engagement as normal as motherhood and apple pie. Don’t make missional engagement sound like something that only missionaries are called to do. Make it natural and an assumption for every disciple. In other words, if you’re a disciple of Jesus, then missional engagement is just a part of it.

If your church is serious about the mission of God and multiplying, you need to normalize mission.

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I want to commend Community Christian Church for producing a fantastic acronym to normalize mission – it’s BLESS. You can find Dave Ferguson’s article and video on it here from Verge. You can also watch Jon Ferguson explaining it here.

Part of my role at Beulah Alliance Church was to lead the church and all the campuses in their missional engagement. And in order to raise the missional culture at Beulah, I needed to give the congregation a tool to normalize mission. Out of all the tools out there, we decided on BLESS because of its simplicity and its ability to make mission seem easy.

Read this article for 5 ways to create a #missional culture in your church

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So here are a few things that we did to create a missional culture:

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